Sir Henry Alexander Wickham (29 May 1846 – 27 September 1928) was a British explorer. He was the first person to successfully export a large, viable shipment of Brazilian rubber seeds to the
British Empire
The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts esta ...
.
The British had long planned to create rubber plantations in
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, south-eastern region of Asia, consistin ...
, and using Wickham's batch, the resulting plantations brought about the end of the
Amazon rubber boom
The Amazon rubber boom ( pt, Ciclo da borracha, ; es, Fiebre del caucho, , 1879 to 1912) was an important part of the economic and social history of Brazil and Amazonian regions of neighboring countries, being related to the extraction and comm ...
.
Life
Henry Wickham was born in
Hampstead
Hampstead () is an area in London, which lies northwest of Charing Cross, and extends from Watling Street, the A5 road (Roman Watling Street) to Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland. The area forms the northwest part of the Lon ...
, north
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
. Wickham's father, a solicitor, died when young Wickham was only four years old.
[Wickham History: Sir Henry Alexander Wickham (1846-1928)]
, accessed November 2017.
- at bouncing-balls.com At age 20 he traveled to
Nicaragua
Nicaragua (; ), officially the Republic of Nicaragua (), is the largest country in Central America, bordered by Honduras to the north, the Caribbean to the east, Costa Rica to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Managua is the cou ...
, the first of several trips to
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
and
South America
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the southe ...
.
Returning to England, he married Violet Carter in 1871, whose father would publish Wickham's writings.
His first book ''Rough Notes of a Journey Through The Wilderness from Trinidad to Pará, Brazil, by way of the Great Cateracts of the Orinoco, Atabapo, and Rio Negro'', was published by W.H.J. Carter in 1872.
He would take the entire family to
Santarém, Brazil, where his mother, sister Harriette, and the mother-in-law to his brother, John, would all die by 1876.
Wickham was knighted in the
1920 Birthday Honours
The 1920 Birthday Honours were appointments by King George V to various orders and honours to reward and highlight good works by citizens of the British Empire. The appointments were made to celebrate the official birthday of The King, and were p ...
"for services in connection with the rubber plantation industry in the Far East."
Smuggling of rubber seeds
Wickham took about a year to collect rubber seeds from commercial rubber groves in Brazil after having been commissioned due to his presence in Brazil. Historian
Warren Dean
Warren Dean (born 9 March 1964) is a former Australian rules footballer who played for Melbourne in the Victorian Football League (VFL) during the late 1980s.
A forward from Subiaco, Dean played 19 games with Melbourne in 1987. He featured ...
notes that it would have been odd for a British expat to collect so many seeds in broad daylight using local labour without local authorities having been aware of it. In fact, he had the permission of the rubber grove operators where he sourced his seeds.
He falsely declared 70,000 seeds as "academic specimens", a term the Brazilians frequently used to classify dead animals or plants, not viable seeds. They arrived in
London's Kew Gardens on June 15, 1876. Within a few weeks, only 2,700 of the 70,000 smuggled seeds had successfully germinated.
They were sufficient to jump-start widespread cultivation in Southeast Asia.
Thirty years after the fact, Wickham claimed in 1908 that he was responsible for stealing about 70,000 seeds
from the rubber-bearing tree, ''
Hevea brasiliensis
''Hevea brasiliensis'', the Pará rubber tree, ''sharinga'' tree, seringueira, or most commonly, rubber tree or rubber plant, is a flowering plant belonging to the spurge family Euphorbiaceae
Euphorbiaceae, the spurge family, is a large fami ...
'', in the
Santarém area of
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
in 1876. At the time, there was no law forbidding the export of seeds, although there was a requirement for an export licence, which Wickham obtained under false pretenses in
Belém
Belém (; Portuguese for Bethlehem; initially called Nossa Senhora de Belém do Grão-Pará, in English Our Lady of Bethlehem of Great Pará) often called Belém of Pará, is a Brazilian city, capital and largest city of the state of Pará in t ...
. From the embellishments—such as having to hide from pursuing gunboats—added to his original account
it appears that Wickham was trying to make his actions more exciting than they were in fact.
The Ayapua Boat Museum (''Museo Barco Historicos'') in
Iquitos
Iquitos (; ) is the capital city of Peru's Maynas Province and Loreto Region. It is the largest metropolis in the Peruvian Amazon, east of the Andes, as well as the ninth-most populous city of Peru. Iquitos is the largest city in the world th ...
, Peru calls his actions "the greatest act of biopiracy in the 19th century, and maybe in history", citing that the seeds were never properly recorded on the ship's manifest and that the resulting plantations in Asia deflated the rubber boom in South America. The museum also claims that he was specifically paid by the
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. An internationally important botanical research and education institution, it employs 1,100 ...
to collect the seeds.
He accompanied the seeds to the Royal Botanic Gardens,
National Archives: Wickham, Sir Henry Alexander (1846-1928), Knight, explorer and planter
– Correspondence relating to the smuggling of rubber seeds from Brazil to Kew, accessed November 2017. from where seedlings were dispatched to British Ceylon
British Ceylon ( si, බ්රිතාන්ය ලංකාව, Britānya Laṃkāva; ta, பிரித்தானிய இலங்கை, Biritthāṉiya Ilaṅkai) was the British Crown colony of present-day Sri Lanka between ...
(now Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka (, ; si, ශ්රී ලංකා, Śrī Laṅkā, translit-std=ISO (); ta, இலங்கை, Ilaṅkai, translit-std=ISO ()), formerly known as Ceylon and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an ...
), British Malaya
The term "British Malaya" (; ms, Tanah Melayu British) loosely describes a set of states on the Malay Peninsula and the island of Singapore that were brought under British hegemony or control between the late 18th and the mid-20th century. U ...
(now Peninsular Malaysia
Peninsular Malaysia ( ms, Semenanjung Malaysia; Jawi: سمننجڠ مليسيا), or the States of Malaya ( ms, Negeri-negeri Tanah Melayu; Jawi: نڬري-نڬري تانه ملايو), also known as West Malaysia or the Malaysian Peninsula, ...
) and Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...
, (though the latter was not used for rubber), Africa, Batavia in Dutch East Indies
The Dutch East Indies, also known as the Netherlands East Indies ( nl, Nederlands(ch)-Indië; ), was a Dutch colony consisting of what is now Indonesia. It was formed from the nationalised trading posts of the Dutch East India Company, which ...
(now Jakarta
Jakarta (; , bew, Jakarte), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta ( id, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta ...
in Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
), and other tropical destinations, thus dooming the Amazon rubber boom
The Amazon rubber boom ( pt, Ciclo da borracha, ; es, Fiebre del caucho, , 1879 to 1912) was an important part of the economic and social history of Brazil and Amazonian regions of neighboring countries, being related to the extraction and comm ...
.
Economic impact
Rubber plantations in Asia proved to be more efficient and outproduced those in Brazil and Peru. This was because the Asian rubber plantations were organized and well-suited for production on a commercial scale, whereas in Brazil and Peru the process of latex gathering from forest trees remained a difficult extractive process: rubber tappers worked natural rubber groves in the southern Amazon forest, and rubber tree densities were almost always low as a consequence of high natural forest diversity. Experiments in cultivating rubber trees in plantations in the Amazon showed them to be vulnerable to South American rubber tree leaf blight fungus and other diseases and pests—essentially limiting South American rubber production to hunting-gathering
A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...
rather than agriculture
Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to ...
.
In spite of decades of research in selecting highly productive and disease resistant rubber trees, many commercial rubber trees throughout the world are descended from the seeds Wickham took to Joseph Dalton Hooker
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (30 June 1817 – 10 December 1911) was a British botanist and explorer in the 19th century. He was a founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For twenty years he served as director of t ...
in London.
In Brazil, Wickham is labeled as a " bio-pirate" for his role in smuggling the rubber seeds that broke the South American monopoly.
References
Further reading
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External links
Henry Wickham biography
- at International Rubber Research & Development Board
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wickham, Henry
1846 births
1928 deaths
Botanists active in South America
19th-century British botanists
Knights Bachelor